Benjamin Prostine is a PhD student who studies the history of capitalism, agriculture, and the environment in the United States. His dissertation project looks at dairy farming across the long twentieth century, following cows, workers, soil, milk, manure and bull semen through the archives. Exploring how exploitation has not only impacted workers, small scale farmers, and the environment but also animals, this project aims to tell the story of what it has meant to be a dairy cow under capitalism. He is currently working on two journal articles, one analyzing how livestock breeding was transformed through the rise of artificial insemination and the business of bull semen, and the other on the rise and fall of the former dairy capital of the United States: Los Angeles County. 

Through journalism, radio, and other public-facing work, he has also written on incarceration, poetry, social movements, labor, and Midwestern history. His most recent article for LaborOnline looks at the Minneapolis mass strikes of 1934 and how they resonate with the social struggles of today.